CongestedCat Productions

Summer 2022 Update

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It’s been a while! Here’s a bit about our 2022.

  • Both Christina & Kelsey, our CongestedCat team leaders, moved to the Hudson Valley this year! Christina & her husband Justin are in Ulster County. Kelsey & Dani are in Dutchess County (and they’re having a baby this fall!). We’re all still just a train ride away from the rest of the team in NYC and plan to continue supporting & shooting in the City, but we’re also excited to start building community and making movies Upstate! We went to our first local event last week, a panel on the state of Film and TV Production in the Hudson Valley.

  • We struggled with sticking to our weekly writing group through the second half of 2020 and 2021, but we’ve been going strong so far this year by committing to meeting at least every other week even if only one person has new pages or pitches. This approach keeps the pressure light while still encouraging creativity and collaboration amongst us.

  • We’ve all continued revising existing projects but most notably on the new side:

    • Kelsey wrote a queer holiday romcom!

    • Christina & Kelsey are writing a queer horror feature together!

      • Christina’s also in early stages of development for her next feature as writer/director, Silent Night, a horror you’ve surely heard her mention in past years. You can hear a bit about the status of that in the mid-year check-in episode of her podcast.

  • IndieWorks is still up in the air but not necessarily gone forever. The fact remains that the pandemic isn’t over and indoor gatherings continue to be risky. And with Christina, Kelsey, and Dani now out of the City, the future of IndieWorks does feel even more unclear than the last two years. But we all love screening films and building community, and it’s something we aspire to get back to when it feels feasible from a safety and bandwidth perspective. Aside from the timeline, all things we said in our blog post last year still stand. We’ve discussed what it could look like bringing IndieWorks back into Manhattan (instead of Queens) with a new venue near Penn Station; we’ve discussed what it could look like moving to a venue Upstate instead and shifting the focus of the series a bit; and we’ve discussed doing both in various combinations to support filmmakers and reach audiences in various ways. We’re intrigued by all the prospects, but nothing can really be decided and acted on until the pandemic is truly under control - which unfortunately doesn’t seem like it’s going to be anytime soon. In the meantime though, we look forward to watching what all our peers in NY are working on and supporting in ways that we’re able to from afar.

CongestedCat's 2020 Goals

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After spending our first writing group of 2020 listing our collective goals as a team for the year, we realized that we’d like to share them publicly with our community. As a company committed to transparency about our creative process and making sure we take every step intentionally & strategically, we thought it’d be helpful to us to have the accountability of our peers and to encourage them to maybe share some creative goals of their own. Our list is ambitious, and we plan to tackle it with all the effort and optimism we’ve got. Here’s to a productive and inspiring year ahead!

Production Goals

  • Attend festivals for “Affliction,” “Shadows,” and “Game Brunch” with the intention of collecting audience emails and/or meeting producers with higher access to capital for our next big project.

    • We also have cultural impact intentions with “Affliction,” to spark nuanced conversation around consent. We plan to have a short but robust festival run across ideally less-progressive cities with strong local community turnout in order to engage people and build momentum for a free online release via press that'll grant us a larger platform specifically before the general election.

  • Produce at least one new short to come out of our weekly writing group.

  • By the end of the year, be on the road to production of another feature film.

    • finish feature film script

    • feedback from potential talent

    • attach a producer

IndieWorks Goals

  • Secure a fiscal sponsor so that we can apply for the Community Arts grant from Queens Council on the Arts at the end of the year in order to rent a Queens theater for Year 8 Best of Fest and offer stipends to our volunteer staff through 2021.

  • Build enough momentum and local awareness in Sunnyside so that we can get back to our previous minimum attendance of 45 people each month, with 1/4 of the audience not affiliated with a specific film of the evening. We want to regain living by our motto, “Discover Shorts. Find an Audience. Build the Community,” on a regular basis in our new home.

'Come Here Often?' won Saturday night's Katra Film Series

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Our first short, ‘Come Here Often?’ (feat. Andres Monsalve & Emma Barrett), was screened at the Katra Film Series this past Saturday, along nine other short films by upcoming NY-based indie filmmakers. It was a great experience, and the first time I had seen the film screened outside of our own spaces.

We found out yesterday afternoon that among the nine films, ours claimed the most amount of votes! As a result, our film will be screened again at a private screening at the end of the year, and be considered for a screening at the East Harlem Film Festival. 

Thanks to all who came out to support us and the Katra Film Series for hosting the event.